It was way rougher than the videogame moral panic ever was. Specific videogames were banned in a country here and there, there was a lot of talk and scaremongering around Mortal Kombat and GTA: SA, and Mass Effect that all boiled down to pretty much nothing. The D&D scare, especially in places like Pyrian alluded to where I lived in the bible belt, had real effects. The house where we held gaming sessions in high school, cops would sit at either end of the block and pull us over as we left when the sessions ended. I'm not sure what they thought they would find. I was the group's "good kid" the one with good grades who got along with the popular kids and never got in trouble in school or with the law, and people in the community constantly asked me about "hanging out with those devil kids." It had my mom legitimately worried I was going to hell for playing a game. One time we played at a cabin on a river one of the guys dad owned. We were interrupted by county sheriff's officers with a "noise complaint." There were no houses within 3 miles of that cabin... While one officer was questioning us, another took a stick and was poking through the embers of our campfire. Like he was seriously looking for evidence of a burnt offering or sacrifice or something. Even years later (this would be in the last 10 years or so) one of the guys operated a diner in town that got shut down for building code violation (legitimate, part of the roof was collapsing due to a nearby sinkhole.) He was renting the building, and the building owner's insurance company was battling the insurance company of the sinkhole landowner and the building owner and my friend agreed he should just take everything out of the building and leave. We all came back to town to help him move his stuff, and to repay us we had a blowout party... taking and cooking all the restaurant food on the restaurant kitchen equipment. It was pretty fun. And of course for old times sake we brought some D&D stuff and played a game. And for old times sake, the cops came by had a look around. Checked us all out, searched our cars, dug through the kitchen and trash we had been gathering...
Yeah, the D&D moral panic was considerably rougher than the videogame moral panic. Mixed with the boredom of cops in small towns of a couple thousand or so the panic led to real harassment from the authorities. Hell, after that the school administration making sure that we all knew our gaming stuff was banned from campus seemed pretty tame. They were surprisingly cool about it, not applying the ban to if some of us wanted to borrow books from another and making the exchange at school. As long as we weren't playing D&D there they didn't seem to care. But I'm sure there were schools that were worse. At ours we were just over half of our top 5% GPA students and they didn't want to fail us or drag down test scores by messing with us.
